Cell Phones-A Funny Poem About Technology and Modern Times

It’s Friday Night which means it is time for poetry in Five! The word this week is Patience(note, I went to the FMF facebook page to get the word and I guess Patience was the Tuesday word, which I didn’t notice until now. I already wrote on Patience so, my apologies fellow FMFers for having the word wrong). My 5 min. ran out about halfway through the poem today, but I was having fun with it so I continued on. Hopefully my readers have a sense of humor and will laugh at this (I love making you guys smile!), because this week’s poem is meant to be funny, satirical and a bit hyperbole. I went the direction of relating patience (or lack thereof) to the challenges of living in a modern society of instant gratification with smart phones at our finger tips and an overwhelm of social media/technology things. I call my poem “Who Needs Patience When You’ve Got a Cell phone?!” (disclaimer- I don’t actually live my life like the poem reads, this is a satire. I usually leave my cell phone in another room at dinner, date nights with my man, or when I’m spending time with friends and family. )

We are living in interesting times. It’s hard to believe in just the 15 short years since I graduated high school, how much cell phones have take over. When I graduated in ’99, cell phones were only used for emergencies (like to have in your car if it broke down for instance) and none of my friends or I had them until a few years later. Of course now, people can’t live without them and it has really changed how we all function. People have a hard time just BEING in the moment without having to DO some thing.

When you think about how we are used to having a device attached to us so that we are never bored, or without something extra to do (multi-tasking anyone?) it is no wonder why people are having less and less patience today. I think about my grandparents and specifically my great grandparents who lived to see a lot of changes- great grandma being born in 1901 and living to see the new Millennium. They had to have patience back then. Everything took longer. Life was slower. And while they worked hard (due to lack of modern conveniences) , life was simpler too.

Washing clothes was an all day event for my great grandma. So was travelling to see relatives by horse and buggy to the nearest bigger city (which is only about 30 min. away by car now, but took hours back then). I have to say, while I am grateful for modern technology and use it daily, I also wish I could turn back the clock some days. Thankfully God has blessed me with a lot of patience. I wonder if I live to be over 100 like my great grandma, how many changes will I witness over my life time? I dare say things are moving at an even faster speed now than they were during her lifetime!

Haha, yes, well , my inspiration for writing it DID come from somewhere ;). I have noticed some of these things and it is interesting how quickly things have changed in the short time since I have graduated high school. I think most of my readers didn’t know what to make of this poem as you are the only one to comment. :). Thanks for stopping by!